Don't Call It Dinner Theater

By

Laura Hedli

Updated April 25, 2013 12:17 p.m. ET

On April 1, the same day spring hours officially started on the High Line, construction began below the elevated park on a 6,000-square-foot pop-up venue called Kazino. Located on the corner of 13th and Washington streets, adjacent to the Standard Hotel, it will begin welcoming guests on May 1.

Lest you mistake the red wood paneling and esoteric name (Kazino being the transliterative Russian word for casino) for just another Meatpacking District nightclub or restaurant, though, you should know it's actually—both, and more. Kazino is the custom-built home for "Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812," an electro-pop opera written by and starring Dave Malloy based on a brief, lovelorn snippet of Tolstoy's "War and Peace."

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Workers construct the interior of Kazino,adowntown pop-up venue built specifically for an opera production.
Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

Designed as an opulent supper club, with nods to 19th- and 20th-century Russian culture, Kazino will arrange audience members at bars and tables, while actors, servers and musicians move throughout the space, treating everything as a stage. Each ticket comes with a full Russo-Franco-themed meal (think borscht, dumplings, towers of seafood, carpaccio), and access to the full bar. As the performers move from table to table and sample the food and drink along with the audience, the sum experience is interactive, integrative and site-specific.

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The pop-up venue Kazino under construction at the corner of 13th and Washington streets.
Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

After the show's premiere last fall at Ars Nova on 54th Street, lead producers Howard and Janet Kagan went in search of a location that would allow "Natasha" to expand both in terms of physical space and creative scope. So they called Randy Weiner and Simon Hammerstein, the night-life gurus behind the Lower East Side venue the Box and, in Mr. Weiner's case, the similarly immersive theater experience "Sleep No More."

"I prefer to not necessarily be in the Times Square area, [but] to be where it's a little bit of an adventure to go to someplace new, to have a theatrical experience that isn't quite like a normal theatrical experience, to have a club experience that's not quite like a club experience," he said. "I think living in that kind of liminal, in between state is what's exciting."

New York theater is still very much proscenium-based, and true pop-ups like Kazino are rare finds. When "Natasha" made its premiere last year, designers repurposed the Ars Nova space, building over the orchestra and taking the audience through the dressing rooms. The workable area, though, was limited by the theater's dimensions. It was a quarter the size of the new space, and all one level—only a hint of what was to come.

At Kazino, audiences will enter through a winding white passageway, from which they can look up and see the tresses of the High Line. The main room holds up to 199 people, and Mr. Kagan estimated the weekly running costs will be a little more than that of a typical off-Broadway show, with approximately another $25,000 going to the wait staff, bartenders and entertainers. (The Kazino bar will be open to the public on show days beginning at 4 p.m., and there will be live pre- and post-show music.)

"This is really like the fulfillment of that [Ars Nova experience]," said Mr. Kagan, who is on the board at Ars Nova and had quickly recognized the growth potential in "Natasha," believing the pop-up model is versatile enough to tour the country. "We're still figuring out what that's going to be like. What is the experience of sitting in this room when there are waiters and we're bringing real food? What is it going to feel like, and how are the transitions going to work?"

After securing approval from Community Board 2, which manages much of lower Manhattan, Kazino was constructed in less than a month by the same team that created the Box. Scenic designer Mimi Lien, who has a background in architecture, was conscious that the set needed to be fully functional and visually appealing at all angles. The look is all waves, sinuous lines created by tabletops that snake through the club. The lighting, however, approximates what you might find in an off-Broadway house, and because the performers and band are scattered throughout the space, the sound designer has to create different mixes for each table.

As with his nightspots, Mr. Weiner believes the design will be every bit as critical to the success of "Natasha" as its lead performances and menu. "It's an amazing marriage Howard's brought together," he said. "We've got venues all over the world that are night life and F&B venues. To bring our level of seriousness about that craft—and it actually is a craft, a business where we create and fulfill fantasies—into the theater world and have it be equally powerful, is a very unusual move."

Apropos of an event that blurs the lines between so many types of entertainment, Mr. Malloy's score is equally genre-bending. A recent sneak preview at the Soho House featured infectious "baroque hip-hop soul" (in Mr. Malloy's words) and sweeping acoustic ballads. For his first solo effort as both librettist and composer, the Brooklyn-based artist (who also performs as Pierre in "Natasha"), took pages from Tolstoy's text and whittled them down, cutting characters, adding lines, and composing for an orchestra that includes clarinet, glockenspiel, cello and guitar.

"My last few shows have been based on old pieces of literature," said Mr. Malloy, whose show "Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage" is simultaneously being mounted at ART in Boston. "So often I get the experience of reading something from the 18th or 19th century and just feeling like, 'Oh, my God, this is so familiar. It's not such an unknown time. These people are really feeling the same things we're feeling."

He said the immersive elements of "Natasha" will help audiences connect with the historical characters. Most of all, he and director Rachel Chavkin (the two are frequent collaborators) love hosting parties, and "Natasha" is their most ambitious to date. "You never run out of food, you never run out of booze, you never run out of conversation, and that totally extends to the theater that we want to make," Ms. Chavkin said. "The idea that you will be fed is both spiritual and literal."

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